Mozilla 1.3 Alpha Released

Friday December 13th, 2002

Mozilla 1.3 Alpha is out! This release introduces shedloads of new Mail & Newsgroups features (including Bayesian spam classification, message views and improved filtering), a new Bookmarks Quick Search bar (similar to the one found in Phoenix) and support for the Back and Forward buttons on the IntelliMouse Explorer. There's also improvements to the DOM Inspector and lots of other bug fixes. However, remember that this is only an alpha release, so expect bugs.

What I'd *really* like to see return here on MozillaZine is the 'Feature Status update' we once had (like in around the Moz-0.9 days - see <http://www.mozillazine.or…articles/article1922.html> for what they were like).
Back then James Russell would post a quite comprehensive overview, for every milestone or so, about exactly what was going on with Mozilla at a 'higher level'. While Bugzilla and Mozilla.org's status update are great for finding individual bugs that are being worked on, it's sometimes hard to see the general direction into which the whole Mozilla project is going in term of planned new features, or overhauls of components that are being worked on. The 'Feature Status updates' used to provide exactly that information. I think a lot of the general unhappiness often seen here like "Why is feature xxx being added while the GUI in component zzz has all these bugs?", stems from this lack (or hard-to-find-ness) of this information that makes it clear and understandable for all of us here as to why the focus is in certain areas and not on others for a certain milestone.

Just to give an example, I just learned from bzbarsky's post above <http://www.mozillazine.or…le=2751&message=24#24> that there will be some 'radical and much-needed changes in [milestone] 1.4' to the layout engine. While this is great news, and I can see or guess at the need (DHTML bugs? Table border bugs? CSS Outline bugs? just to mention a few very persistent layout problems), it is much less clear *what* exactly will be the focus of these changes (are they indeed to fix the unsolved rendering bugs we have that I just mentioned, or will it focus on performance?) and *why* exactly this is planned for milestone 1.4? Why was it not scheduled for 1.3? Why not 1.5? If 1.4 will focus on layout, what will be focussed on for 1.5? It seems 1.2 and 1.3a had a great (and much appreciated!) focus on Mail/News, but nothing made that as clear as the release notes did! Which is fine, but it would be nice to see this direction of development at the beginning of the milestone, instead of when it is being released.